k running amuck with a carving
knife in his hand would have bean a nahsty thing to meet, you know.'
There were no knives in this case, only a woman's tongue. Stevenson
says that he doesn't know how it happened, 'but next moment we were
out in the rain, and I was cursing before the carriage entry like a
disappointed mendicant.'

'It's all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of
police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from
an inn door change your views upon the subject, like a course of
lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world
bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air;
but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil.
I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then
I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality.'

Stevenson declares that he could have set the temple of Diana on fire
that night if it had been handy. 'There was no crime complete enough
to express my disapproval of human institutions.' As for the baronet,
he was horrified to learn that he had been taken for a peddler again;
and he registered a vow before Heaven never to be uncivil to a
peddler. But before making that vow he particularized a complaint for
every joint in the landlady's body.

To read _An Inland Voyage_ is to be impressed anew with the thought
that some men are born with a taste for vagabondage. They are
instinctively for being on the move. Like the author of that book they
travel 'not to go any where but to go.' If they behold a stage-coach
or a railway train in motion they heartily wish themselves aboard.
They are homesick when they stop at home, and are only at home when
they are on the move. Talk to them of foreign lands and they are
seized with unspeakable heart-ache and longing. Stevenson met an
omnibus driver in a Belgian village who looked at him with thirsty
eyes because he was able to travel. How that omnibus driver 'longed to
be somewhere else and see the round world before he died.' 'Here I
am,' said he. 'I drive to the station. Well. And then I drive back
again to the hotel. And so on every day and all the week round. My
God, is that life?' Stevenson opined that this man had in him the
making of a traveler of the right sort; he might have gone to Africa
or to the Indies after Drake. 'But it is an evil age for the gipsily
inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a thre